If you drop molten glass into a bucket of cold water, it cools into a weird tadpole shape: a round head with a long, thin tail. It’s called a Prince Rupert’s Drop, and no matter how hard you hit the head with a hammer, it won’t break. But if you nick the tail even slightly, the whole drop explodes into tiny shards of… »8/02/15 12:00pm Today 12:00pm

The Mean Tweets genre — whereby a celebrity reads a sampling of their Twitter abuse — is well established by this stage in the internet life cycle. So it’s about time that Bill Nye shared his worst. »8/01/15 12:00pm Yesterday 12:00pm

Most of us will never get to see a volcanic eruption in person, but thanks to these videos, we can not only see recent eruptions, we can journey into the mouths of volcanos without leaving the safety of our homes. You can almost feel the heat on your face. »6/16/15 11:58pm 6/16/15 11:58pm

KQED’s excellent science series Deep Look (previously here, here, and here—can you tell we’re fans?) just kicked off a new run of videos with an episode about how ants use leaves to harvest fungus. Which, sure, fungus harvesting is fascinating in its own right, but wait until you find out what the ants are harvesting… »6/13/15 11:45am 6/13/15 11:45am

Happy Memorial Day. For some reason, instead of having fun outside with your friends, you are alone in front of your computer, reading a blog post. Maybe you didn’t get the day off work, or maybe you’re hung over. That’s OK. You can celebrate the Memorial Days of 1983, 1986, 1988, and 1992—all thanks to YouTube’s… »5/25/15 6:00pm 5/25/15 6:00pm

You may enjoy watching the hours of footage you recorded the last time you went skiing, but your friends are too polite to tell you how boring it actually is. So instead of spending days editing your adventures down to a short highlight reel, Microsoft has just introduced a new app called Hyperlapse that can… »5/14/15 9:00am 5/14/15 9:00am

Your education doesn’t have to stop once you leave school. We’ve put together a curriculum of some of the best free online classes available on the web this summer for the latest term of Lifehacker U, our regularly-updating guide to improving your life with free, online college-level classes. Let’s get started. »5/13/15 1:12pm 5/13/15 1:12pm

CSI:Cyber is Gizmodo’s new favorite terrible tech-tinged procedural that may or may not be written by people who have never actually seen a computer. It’s great! This compilation of buzzwords from the fourth and fifth episodes of this season is a nonsense cacophony. »4/13/15 7:40pm 4/13/15 7:40pm

As the ongoing Meerkatification of humanity proves, the internet (in one form or another) is becoming more and more about video. At peak times, Netflix and YouTube alone account for half of all web traffic. That’s an understandably huge burden for ISPs to carry. But as well as making the pipes bigger, we can also… »4/07/15 12:00am 4/07/15 12:00am

This short film documents life on Tashirojima, a tiny island off the Oshika Peninsula in Japan. It’s home to 800 cat overlords, and the 100 or so humans who slavishly feed their feral masters. »4/02/15 10:00pm 4/02/15 10:00pm

When we stepped inside the facility, you could almost smell the circuitboard. All around us conveyor belts were transporting staggering heaps of electronics to and from shredders and sorters—from hard drives to old TVs, to medical devices, Macbooks, and printers. So many printers. »3/19/15 11:00am 3/19/15 11:00am

You may not own your own private planetarium — or if you do, can we come over to your house? But you can still experience a journey through the wonders of space, thanks to four new "fulldome" planetarium clips, released by the Hubble Space Telescope. They're available in 4K and 8K resolution. »2/28/15 9:16am 2/28/15 9:16am

Much as Apple's successes are celebrated in breathless blog posts and barely believable earnings reports, it still screws up as much as any company. Maps. Crappy battery life. Forcibly inserting Bono into your life. This (quite fake) ad details how those mistakes would apply to the rumored Apple automobile. »2/24/15 11:00pm 2/24/15 11:00pm